


A Field Guide to Hair Care in Wartime

by saltsanford



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-24
Updated: 2016-01-24
Packaged: 2018-05-15 20:24:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5798728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltsanford/pseuds/saltsanford
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carolina, and how to shed the weight of the years. Set immediately after the death of the Director, season 10.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Field Guide to Hair Care in Wartime

When Carolina is five years old, she cuts off all her hair.  
  
It is a thing that makes complete sense at the time, although her reasons for doing it have been lost through the years. She remembers a fight with her parents and storming off to her room. She remembers sneaking downstairs and grabbing the kitchen scissors from the wooden butcher block and cutting it right then and there. Most of all, she remembers the fuzzy _snapsnapsnap_ of the scissors, and the way her fallen hair looked like a garden of wheat fanning around her ankles.  
  
Her mother appears and freezes in the doorway. When Carolina tries to explain why she did it, she cannot. She is five years old and the words do not come. She cannot find a word for the possessive, protective thing inside of her, nor what her hair has to do with it.  
  
When she is 16 years old, she dyes her blonde hair scarlet.

Her father doesn’t say: _you look more like your mother every day_. He doesn’t have to. She can see it, in both the sad way he looks at her and the photograph she finds of her mother at age sixteen. The hair dye stains her temples and the back of her neck, coats her fingers like blood. It will be several years before she perfects the art of coloring her hair, before she discovers the good brands, the trick of twisting her hair just so, the plastic gloves that don’t tear over her fingernails. For now, she looks in the mirror and feels reborn.

She is thirty-five and her hair, when let down, falls just below her shoulder blades. Her mother is still dead, her friends are still dead, her father either dying or dead. There are knots in her chest, knots that have been there for years, and she suddenly cannot bear them another second. Carolina walks calmly away from Wash and the Simulation Troopers as they wait for the ship. Once she is out of their line of vision, her walk turns into a stumbling run. She barely makes it to the end of a nearby rocky cliff before ripping off her helmet and vomiting violently over the ledge, but it’s not enough. She unsnaps her knife from its holster on her thigh with trembling hands, grabs hold of her ponytail, and saws the whole thing off at the root.

Something loosens in her chest.  
  
Epsilon winks to life in front of her. "That was dramatic."  
  
"Shut up."

“What, was that supposed to be your grand moment of closure or something? Whatever happened to _letting things go?”_

“ _Epsilon_ —”

“I’m just saying.”

Carolina doesn’t answer, just breathes deeply as her severed ponytail sways in the soft wind. Epsilon is quiet for a while as well, swinging his foot in the air a little dejectedly. “Where are we gonna find me a body?” he asks abruptly.

Carolina frowns at him. “A body?”

“Yeah, a body. I figure, now that this whole thing is over, I should…” he gestures. “You know.”

“Oh.” Carolina pauses. “Do you _want_ a body?”

“Huh?”

“Well, it’s just…I thought, maybe, you could stay with me. If you want,” she adds hastily, because Epsilon has gone incredibly still. “I mean, I have all this equipment to run, and we did make a pretty good team back there…”

Epsilon is so still that Carolina is starting to wonder if he’s glitched. “You want me to stay?” he finally asks.

“I…yes. But only if you want to.”

“I’d like that,” he says quietly. “Yeah, okay. Yeah! Let’s fucking _do_ that.”

Carolina grins at him, her first real one in ages, and although it feels foreign on her face, it also feels good.

“Carolina?” She turns to see Wash coming around the corner. “We’ve got a bit of a wait before the ship comes, so I thought we should—” he stops short when he sees her, and she realizes that she’s still clutching both her hair and knife.

She also realizes that it’s the first time he’s seen her face since she found him. “Hey, Wash,” she says softly.

Wash stares at her for a moment before popping the seals on his helmet. “Hey, Carolina.” They stand there, mesmerized, green eyes gazing into blue until Wash clears his throat and the moment is broken. “Are you…okay?”

Carolina snaps the knife back onto her thigh, but she still holds tightly to her hair. “I think I will be.”

Wash nods. “I suppose there’s no point in asking you for my pistol back.”

She shakes her head, not trusting herself to speak, and lets Wash draw his own conclusion. “It’s done, then?” he asks quietly, glancing at Epsilon.

Epsilon fidgets. “It’s, uh, yeah. It’s over, Wash.”

Carolina watches the two of them as they look awkwardly at each other. She tries to ignore the overwhelming feelings of guilt pouring off of Epsilon—guilt for Wash, guilt for his friends, guilt for wishing he had the satisfaction of watching the Director take his last breath. Guilt, so much guilt that she feels she might drown in it.

“It was their idea,” Wash says suddenly. He jerks his head back to where she can here the sim troopers bickering. “To come help you guys, I mean. Not mine.”

His voice is terse, matter-of-fact, but it is not cruel. Carolina nods slowly. “But you did come.”

“Someone had to watch their backs,” he says, and _there_ it is, the barely-contained fury that she was expecting. _Protecting my friends._

Carolina clears her throat, exchanges a quick glance with Epsilon. “Wash, I’m…”

“Don’t apologize to me, Carolina. Apologize to them.” Wash glances back towards the bickering voices, and something softens in his face. “They’ll forgive you.”

Carolina snorts bitterly. “What makes you so sure?”

“They forgave me.” Wash shakes his head. “And I deserved it even less than you did.”

The tension lifts a little. Just then, Tucker’s voice sounds from around the corner. “Hey, Wash! Where the fuck did you guys all—oh.” Tucker stops short, staring at Carolina. “Aw, nice! I knew you were a hottie!”

Carolina rolls her eyes as Tucker sidles conspiratorially up to Wash and murmurs, “so uh, _why_ weren’t you guys hooking up again?”

Wash sighs. “ _Really_ , Tucker?”

“Hey, I’m just saying. She’s a _ten._ You’re a ten,” Tucker says to Carolina directly, as if she somehow hasn’t been able to hear every word.

Epsilon groans. “Oh, my god Tucker, give it a rest, for fuck’s sake.”

Carolina stiffens a little as the rest of the Reds and Blues wander around the corner and make themselves comfortable. None of them seem to care all that much about the fact that she’s helmet-less for the first time, except for Grif who does a double take. “ _Jeez_ , what did you do, take a machete to it?”

Carolina follows Grif’s gaze to the severed ponytail clenched in her fist. “Something like that.”

“Well, you look ridiculous,” he says flatly. He takes off his helmet, and, bizarrely, his gloves. “Come here. Let me fix it.”

She actually jerks back a little. “What?”

“Your hair,” he says, impatient. He shoves his helmet at Caboose. “Go fill this up with water for me, will you?”

“Um,” says Carolina as Caboose bounds off. “Why do you want to fix my hair?”

“Because it’s _absurd_ , weren’t you listening? You can’t call yourself a badass and go around looking like that.”

Carolina bristles. “No one is going to see me under my helmet.”

“Well, if you’re gonna be on our team, then that means _I_ have to look at you when we’re at base. I’m telling you, I can’t take you seriously with that haircut.”

“Not that I’m agreeing with Grif or anything,” Sarge grunts, “but it’s bad enough trying to take FreckleLancer here seriously. If we’re going to have two self-proclaimed bad-asses on the team at least one of them needs to look the part.”

Carolina glances at Wash, confused. He gives her a half-smile and a shrugs fondly. She can practically hear the unspoken _I-told-you-so_.

“Here you go!” Caboose has returned with Grif’s helmet, water sloshing over the sides of it.

Simmons winces. “Grif, that’s gonna fry the _wires_ —”

“Oh, don’t be such a baby, our helmets are waterproof.” He takes the helmet from Caboose and uses his free hand to fish a small knife out of his armor pocket. “Come here, Carolina.”

Coming from anyone else, the gesture would be ominous, but ominous doesn’t quite work on Grif. The sound of her name falling from one of the sim troopers’ mouths also startles her: she doesn’t think any of them have used it before. Carolina looks again at Wash, who gives her an encouraging nod. She sighs and makes her way over to Grif.

“You’re getting a haircut, not walking the plank,” Tucker says, and she spares him a withering look before taking a seat on the rock Grif is gesturing at.

Carolina yelps as he upends the water-filled helmet over her head. “Hey!”

“Sorry,” he says, not sounding apologetic in the slightest.

She wipes her mouth, sputtering. “Was that really necessary?”

“You can’t cut hair when it’s dry! Not that you _know_ that, apparently…”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” she grumbles at Grif.

“Relax, I used to cut my sister’s hair all the time.”

She tenses a little when she feels Grif’s fingers on her neck, but if he notices, he doesn’t comment. “You have a sister?” she asks.

“Sure do.”

“I have seventeen sisters,” Caboose says happily.

“We still don’t know if he’s serious about that or not,” Tucker says conversationally, removing his helmet and shaking out his dreads. He squints at Grif. “Dude, are you like, giving her _layers_?”

“Hey, Kai was picky as shit about her hair,” Grif says, defensive. “I had no choice but to do it right.”

Carolina wonders why Grif had to cut his sister’s hair. She wonders how Tucker got his dreads past basic, and if Caboose really does have seventeen sisters. Each new piece of information hits her like a punch to the gut, and she thinks that perhaps she can’t blame Epsilon for his guilt, after all.

She is all but overwhelmed by her own.

“I’m sorry,” she says suddenly, and they all pause.

She forces herself to look at them each in turn. “And…thank you. For coming with us.”

“Ah, well, Red Team never backs down from a fight,” Sarge says gruffly.

“I’m sorry too,” Epsilon says suddenly. He coughs a little. “For uh, ya know. Being a giant dick.”

Tucker waves a hand dismissively. “We’re used to it, dude.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“Alright, are we done with the sappy speeches now?” Grif asks, annoyed.

Carolina listens to them bicker and joke. She looks around at them all, from Tucker tying back his dreads, to Sarge giving ridiculous pointers on how to cut hair and lifting up chunks of Caboose’s curls to demonstrate, to Simmons drying out Grif’s helmet, to Wash cleaning out Blue Team’s guns. She can faintly hear Doc and Donut’s voices filtering from around the corner. There is noise buzzing everywhere, but it no longer crashes around in her skull.

Maybe, after years of silence, she needs a little noise.

Grif works with a gentle diligence that she wasn’t expecting, his hands warm and soft on her scalp. At least half an hour passes before he walks around and crouches, eyeing her critically. “Much better,” he says approvingly. “Caboose, c’mere. Let her see in your helmet.”

Caboose bounds over happily and crouches down about six inches from her face. Carolina forces herself not to jerk away, and stares into the slightly blurry image she can see reflected back in Caboose’s visor. She reaches up to touch the choppy pixie cut Grif has left her with, and the knots in her chest work themselves a little looser still.

Grif is watching her. “Better?”

She tears her gaze away from the reflection to look up. “Better. Um…”

Grif starts inching away before she can get the _thank you_ out. “Yeah yeah.”

Caboose is still crouched in front of her, unmoving in a way she’s never seen before, and she steals another glance at her image.

“Wash,” she says, and he glances her way. “Get rid of this for me?”

She holds out her ponytail. Wash walks over and takes it from her gently, twisting the strands in between his hands like rope. “You got it, Lina,” he says quietly, and she has to blink hard at the way he says it. Wash approaches the edge of the cliff, and removes the band from her ponytail. He lets the hair fall, the strands drifting slowly out of sight, like sparks floating in the wind, and although the grief is not gone, will never be fully gone, there is a lightness in her chest that has nothing to do with the length of her hair. 

It does, however, have everything to do with the cutting.


End file.
